deleuze and derrida, immanence and transcendence: two ...in a recent essay, giorgio agamben has...

CHAPTER 3

Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence andTranscendence: Two Directions in

Recent French Thought

Daniel W. Smith

In a recent essay, Giorgio Agamben has identified two different trajectories incontemporary French philosophy, both of which pass through Heidegger: atrajectory of transcendence, which includes Levinas and Derrida, and goes backthrough Husserl to Kant; and a trajectory of immanence, which includes Fou-cault and Deleuze, and goes back through Nietzsche to Spinoza.1 Deleuzeand Levinas are no doubt the most obvious representatives of these twotrajectories: Deleuze explicitly describes himself as a philosopher of imma-nence, while Levinas explicitly claims the mantle of transcendence (the'Other' being the paradigmatic concept of transcendence). But Derrida clearlybelongs to the trajectory of transcendence as well, and Agamben's typologythus provides us with a valuable grid for assessing the relation between Der-rida and Deleuze, at least in a preliminary manner. Agamben does not himselfdevelop his insight in detail, and perhaps for good reason. Immanence andtranscendence are both highly overdetermined terms in the history of philos-ophy, and it is not immediately clear what it would mean to be a philosopherof either one. The very term 'transcendence' has theological and spiritualovertones that tend to obscure the wider history and varied philosophical usesof the concept. Moreover, one might be tempted to question the use of sucha 'binary opposition' to characterise philosophers like Derrida and Deleuze,given their shared critique of the use of oppositional strategies in philosophy.But such a dismissal would be both hasty and superficial. Immanence andtranscendence are relative terms, not opposites, which means that in eachcase one must ask: Immanent to what? Or transcendent to what? As such,immanence and transcendence can be helpful terms not so much in determin-ing the differing 'positions' of Derrida and Deleuze, but rather as means ofcharting out their differing philosophical 'trajectories', at least relative to each

Deleuze and Derrick, Immanence and Transcendence 47

other. There are three traditional areas of philosophy, in particular, in whichthese terms have found a specific use - namely, the fields of subjectivity,ontology and epistemology. Derrida and Deleuze have written on each ofthese topics, and although these fields certainly do not exhaust the themes ofimmanence and transcendence, they nonetheless provide points of referencefrom which we can evaluate the work of Derrida and Deleuze using Agam-ben's typology. In what follows, then, I would like to consider each of thesedomains in turn, showing how, in each case, Derrida explicitly aligns himselfwith the trajectory of transcendence, while Deleuze consistently follows thetrajectory of immanence. At best, this is a propadeutic study, a kind of'vectorial' analysis that seeks to diagram, in a general manner, the divergentdirections Derrida and Deleuze have followed in their philosophical careers,despite (or perhaps even because of) their initial interest in a number ofshared problematics.

The tradition of subjectivity provides us with a first and obvious model oftranscendence. For any philosophy that begins with the subject - that is, muchof post-Cartesian philosophy - the concept of immanence refers to the sphereof the subject, while transcendence refers to what lies outside the subject, suchas the 'external world' or the 'other'. In this tradition, the term 'transcendence'refers to that which transcends the field of consciousness immanent to thesubject. On this score, one has only to think of the problems posed in Husserl'sfifth Cartesian Meditation., the theme of 'Being-with-Others' in Sartre, orLevinas' own philosophy of alterity. But one also finds, in the subjectivisttradition, a second, and perhaps more profound, problem of transcendence,which is what Sartre called, in his article of the same name, 'The Transcen-dence of the Ego'. In Kant, the ego or the 'I think' accompanies all (or mostof) my representations - it is precisely what makes them mine. Against Kant,Sartre pushed for a conception of an impersonal transcendental field that waswithout an ego, much like William James' notion of a 'pure flux of conscious-ness'.2 In other words, when one says that the field of consciousness isimmanent to a transcendental subject, one is already erecting the subject as anelement of transcendence that goes beyond the flux of experience.3 Already,then, we find two models of transcendence at work in the subjectivist tradition:the other (or the 'world', in Heidegger) is what transcends the self, but thesubject itself is already transcendent in relation to 'experience' (passive synthe-ses). Consequently, one might say that there are two general means by whichone can call into question the status of the transcendental subject (the well-known theme of the 'death of the subject'): by appealing either to thetranscendence of the other or to the immanent flux of experience itself. It would besimplistic to suggest that Derrida simply followed the first path and Deleuzethe second, but the 'elective affinities' of the two thinkers seem evident.

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Derrida and Deleuze, however, are both critical of the subjectivist tradition,and the more telling differences between them lie elsewhere.

A second model for thinking about the immanence/transcendence distinc-tion is related, not to the question of subjectivity (the field of consciousness)but rather to the question of ontology (the field of Being). Put simply, animmanent or pure ontology would be an ontology in which there is nothing'beyond' or 'higher than' or 'superior to' Being. By contrast, the fundamentalontological categories of transcendence would include the 'God' of the Chris-tian tradition, the 'Good' in Plato, the 'One' in Plotinus4 - all of which aresaid to be 'beyond' Being, 'otherwise' than Being ('transcendent' to Being),and are thereby used to 'judge' Being, or at least to account for Being.5 On thequestion of Being, Derrida and Deleuze - like all contemporary thinkers - areclearly indebted to Heidegger, who inaugurated the renaissance of ontology intwentieth-century thought (which is why Heidegger rightly functions as thelynchpin in Agamben's classification). Yet it is equally clear that Deleuze andDerrida take Heidegger's ontological project in two very different directions:Deleuze attempts to develop an immanent ontology, while Derrida's decon-struction necessarily operates on the basis of a formal structure of transcen-dence.6 On this score, we can make use of several rubrics to help map thedivergent ontological trajectories of Derrida and Deleuze: their respectiverelation to metaphysics, their different concepts (or 'quasi-concepts') of'differ-ence', and their contrasting uses of the history of philosophy (using the 'divinenames' tradition as an example).

Early in his career, Derrida took over, in his own manner, the Heideggeriantask of 'overcoming metaphysics', while Deleuze, for his part, would later saythat 'going beyond metaphysics or the death of philosophy' had never been anissue for him (Deleuze 1995b, 88). It would not be an exaggeration to say thatit was their respective adoption and rejection of this Heideggerian problematicwhich initially set Derrida and Deleuze on their divergent trajectories oftranscendence and immanence. In Derrida, metaphysics is determined by itsstructural 'closure', and deconstruction is a means of disturbing this closure,creating an opening or an interruption. The notion of metaphysical closureitself depends on a movement of transcendence, that is, an 'excess over thetotality, without which no totality would appear'.7 Since one cannot transcendmetaphysics as such - there is no 'outside' to the metaphysical tradition - onecan only destructure or deconstruct metaphysics from within. The project of'overcoming metaphysics', in other words, is an impossibility, but it is this veryimpossibility that conditions the possibility of deconstructing the philosophicaltradition from within. Rather than trying to get outside metaphysics, one cansubmit 'the regulated play of philosophemes' in the history of philosophy to acertain slippage or sliding that would allow them to be read as 'symptoms of

Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence 49

something that could not be presented in the history of philosophy' (Derrida1981 b, 6-7).8 Immanent within metaphysics, there lies a formal structure oftranscendence that can never be made present as such, but that nonethelessfunctions as the condition (the 'quasi-transcendental' condition) of metaphys-ics itself. Derrida thus situates his work, he says, at 'the limit of philosophicaldiscourse', at its margins, its borders or boundary lines (Derrida 1981b, 6).The border he straddles is the border between the closed and immanenttotality of metaphysics, with its exhausted concepts and philosophemes, andthat which exceeds that totality, that is, a formal structure of transcendencethat is, as it were, everywhere at work in metaphysics, though it can never bemade present as such.

Derrida attempts to think this formal structure of transcendence throughconcepts such as differance (which is, then, at best a 'quasi-concept', since thenotion of a concept is itself metaphysical). If metaphysics is denned in termsof presence, then differance is that which marks 'the disappearance of anyoriginary presence',9 that which thereby exceeds or transcends metaphysics,and thereby, at the same time, constantly disrupts and 'destabilises' metaphys-ics. Commenting on Heidegger's notion of the 'ontological difference', Derridawrites that 'there may be a difference still more unthought than the differencebetween Being and beings. . . . Beyond Being and beings, this difference,ceaselessly differing from and deferring (itself), would trace (itself) (by itself)- this differance would be the first or last trace if one still could speak, here, oforigin and end' (Derrida 1982, 67). The long series of notions developed inDerrida's work - not only differance and the trace, but also text, writing, thehymen, the supplement, the pharmakon, the parergon, justice, messianicity, andso on - are all traces of this formal structure of transcendence, marked by theiraporetic or antinomial status, their possibility conditioned by their impossibil-ity, and so on. Deconstruction thus operates in the interval between the closedtotality of metaphysics and the formal transcendence of differance (or asDerrida says in 'Force of Law', in the interval between the deconstructibilityof law [droit] and the undeconstructibility of justice (1992b, 243).

Deleuze, by contrast, has a very different and non-Heideggerian relation tometaphysics. He described himself candidly as a 'pure metaphysician' in themould of Bergson and Whitehead. 'I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician',he said in a late interview, 'Bergson says that modern science hasn't found itsmetaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interestsme' (Villani 1999, 130). He consequently saw himself as 'the most naivephilosopher of our generation. . . . the one who felt the least guilt about "doingphilosophy"' (Deleuze 1995b, 88-9). If one is critical of traditional metaphys-ics, or metaphysical concepts such as identity or essence, he suggests, then thephilosophical task is not to attempt to 'overcome' metaphysics, but rather to

50 Daniel W. Smith

actively construct a different metaphysics. This is why one does not find, inDeleuze, any general pronouncements concerning the 'nature' of 'Westernmetaphysics' (as 'logocentric', or as a 'metaphysics of presence'), since, asDerrida notes, the only position from which one could make such a pronounce-ment is a position of transcendence, which Deleuze rejects. Consequently,there is no concept of closure in Deleuze either (since closure likewise dependson transcendence). From the start, Deleuze denned structures as such -whether mathematical, philosophical, or otherwise - as fundamentally 'open',and he saw metaphysics itself as an open structure, which is far from havingexhausted its 'possibilities'. This not only means that the 'creation of the new'is possible within metaphysics, but also that one can retrieve or repeat - to useHeidegger's term - avenues of thought in the history of metaphysics that wereonce opened, only to be quickly closed off again (for instance, the concept ofunivocity). Deleuze sees his work as being strictly immanent to metaphysics:creation and transformation are possible within metaphysics, and there arevirtualities in past metaphysics that are capable of being reactivated, as it were,and inserted into new contexts, and new problematics. Metaphysics itself, inother words, is dynamic and in constant becoming.

Put crudely, then, if Derrida sets out to undo metaphysics, Deleuze sets outsimply to do metaphysics. The results can appear to be very similar - afterDeleuze died, Derrida wrote, in a short memorial text, of the 'near totalaffinity' he saw between Deleuze's work and his own - but in fact the contextof their work is very different: a horizon of transcendence in Derrida (overcom-ing or going beyond metaphysics), and a function of immanence in Deleuze(doing metaphysics).10 This difference may appear to be slight, but its veryslightness acts like a butterfly effect that propels Derrida and Deleuze alongtwo divergent trajectories that become increasingly remote from each other, tothe point of perhaps being incompatible. Nowhere is this more evident than inDeleuze's own theory of difference. Deleuze and Derrida are both seen -rightly - as philosophers of difference. Derrida's essay 'Difference' andDeleuze's book Difference and Repetition both appeared in 1968, and Heideg-ger's notion of the 'ontological difference' between Being and beings was oneof the primary (though not the only) impetuses in their development of atheory of difference. But Derrida moves immediately in the direction oftranscendence: what he was seeking, he tells us, is a difference 'beyond Beingand beings', and this is precisely how he characterises differance: 'a differencestill more unthought than the [ontological] difference between Being andbeings' (Derrida 1982, 67).

In Difference and Repetition, by contrast, Deleuze proposes an interpretationof the ontological difference that radicalises it in the direction of immanence.'In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition', he writes, 'difference


must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to differentwithout any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogousor the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itselfwhich is like a differentiator [a Sich-unterscheidende] by virtue of which differenceis gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a priorresemblance, identity, analogy, or opposition' (Deleuze 1994, 117). Theproject of Difference and Repetition^ in other words, is to provide an immanentanalysis of the ontological difference in which the different is related to thedifferent through difference itself: Being must not only be able to account for theexternal difference between beings, but also the fact that beings themselves aremarked by an 'internal difference'; and the ontological difference must notonly refer to the difference between Being and beings, but also the differenceof Being from itself, 'an alliance of Being and itself in difference' (Deleuze1994, 231). The concepts of difference that Deleuze develops in Difference andRepetition - 'difference in intensity, disparity in the phantasm, dissemblance inthe form of time, the differential in thought' (Deleuze 1994, 145) - have avery different status than the notion of difference Derrida develops in his essay'Differance'. For Derrida, differance is a relation that transcends ontology, thatdiffers from ontology, that goes beyond or is more 'originary' than theontological difference between Being and beings. Deleuze's aim, by contrast,is to show that ontology itself is constituted immanently by a principle ofdifference (and is thus a 'concept', in the Deleuzian sense of the term, and notmerely a 'quasi-concept'). Deleuze is not often thought of as a Heideggerian,but Difference and Repetition can be read as a direct response to Being and Timefrom the standpoint of immanence: for Deleuze, Being is difference, and timeis repetition.

Deleuze has himself provided a way of assessing the status of Derrida'squasi-concept of differance. In What is Philosophy?^ Deleuze and Guattaripresent a rather summary typology of three general strategies by whichtranscendence has been introduced into philosophy. The first, and no doubtparadigmatic, type is the one found in Platonism and its variants: the field ofimmanence is a simple field of phenomena or appearances, which onlypossesses secondarily what is attributed first of all to the anterior unity of theIdea (or in later variants, to the 'One beyond Being' in Plotinus, or to thetranscendence of the Christian 'God').11 Modern philosophy effected a secondtype of transcendence: beginning with Descartes, and then with Kant, thecogito made it possible to treat the plane of immanence as a field of conscious-ness, which was attributed, as we have seen, no longer to the transcendence ofthe Idea, but rather to the transcendence of the Subject or the Ego. Finally,the third (and contemporary) form of transcendence - which is the one thatconcerns us - was introduced by phenomenology and its successors. When

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immanence becomes immanent to a transcendental subjectivity, it is fromwithin its own field that the mark of transcendence must appear. 'Husserlconceived of immanence as the flux of lived experience within subjectivity',write Deleuze and Guattari, 'but since this lived experience, pure and evenprimordial, does not belong completely to the self that represents it to itself, itis in the regions of non-belonging that the horizon of something transcendent isreestablished' (DG 1994b, 46). Deleuze and Guattari do not name nameshere, but one can easily imagine examples. Levinas, for example, founds ethicson the infinite transcendence of the 'Other' which challenges the status of thereflective subject and undoes the primacy of the Same.12 In a different manner,Habermas attempts to ground ethics on the privileged transcendence of anintersubjective world populated by other selves, and regulated by a 'communi-cative consensus'. Whatever form it takes, in this contemporary moment oftranscendence one no longer thinks of immanence as immanent to something(the Idea, the Subject), but on the contrary 'one seeks to rediscover atranscendence within the heart of immanence itself, as a breach or interruptionof its field' (DG 1994b, 46). One seeks, in other words, a transcendence withinimmanence.

Derrida, in his own manner, clearly belongs to this contemporary (and post-phenomenological) tradition of transcendence. This is evidenced, moreover, inhis many readings of texts in the history of philosophy, which attempt touncover, within the immanent and manifest movement of traditional philo-sophical concepts and their 'binary oppositions', a latent and transcendentmovement of differance that is never present as such in the text but constantlyserves to disrupt and destabilise it. This way of treating the history ofphilosophy raises a question that is intrinsically linked to the ontological themeof transcendence and immanence. What Heidegger bequeathed to contempor-ary philosophy was not only a rejuvenation of ontology, but concomitant withthat, a certain treatment of the history of philosophy under the double themeof the 'destruction' of the history of ontology as well as the 'retrieval' or'repetition' of that history. Indeed, for the generation to which Deleuze andDerrida belonged, the philosophical training one received in the Frenchuniversity was oriented almost exclusively towards the history of philosophy.Deleuze and Derrida's contrasting relation to metaphysics is thus reflected intheir contrasting relation to the history of philosophy. In this regard, we canconsider, as a precise historical example, an aspect of the medieval philosoph-ical tradition in which Heidegger took a strong interest - the theologicaltradition of the 'divine names'. Heidegger himself first formulated his ontolog-ical question in the context of these medieval debates, and in taking up thesedebates for their own account, Derrida and Deleuze have each moved in


clearly differentiated directions: Derrida in the direction of 'negative theology'(transcendence) and Deleuze in the direction of 'univocity' (immanence).13

Heidegger wrote his doctoral thesis on Duns Scotus, who was engaged in arather lively thirteenth-century debate concerning the nature of Being. Beingis said of beings, but in what sense? The Scholastics used three precise terms todesignate the various ways of resolving the problem: equivocity, univocity andanalogy. To say that Being is equivocal means that the term 'Being' is said ofbeings in several senses, and that these senses have no common measure: 'Godis' does not have the same sense as 'man is', for instance, because God doesnot have the same type of being as man. By contrast, to say that Being isunivocal, as Duns Scotus affirmed, means that Being has only one sense, andis said in one and the same sense of everything of which it is said, whether itbe God or man, animal or plant. Since these positions seemed to lead toscandalous conclusions - equivocity denied order in the cosmos, univocityimplied pantheism - a third choice was developed between these two extremes:Being is neither equivocal nor univocal but analogical: there is indeed acommon measure to the forms of Being, but this measure is analogical, andnot univocal. This was the position of Aristotle, which Heidegger discusses inthe opening pages of Being and Time: Being is said in several senses, and thesesenses are the categories, which are related to Being, and to each other, bymeans of analogy. Christianity famously transposed this ontological probleminto a theological problem, which was concerned less with the relation of Beingto being than the relation of God to his creatures (hence the Heideggerianthematic of 'onto-theology').

Medieval theology had developed a syncretic solution to the immanence/transcendence problem: it insisted on the requirement of immanence, that is,the ontological requirement that the first principle (God) be a being; but it alsoinsisted on the more powerful requirement of transcendence, that is, therequirement that the transcendence of God be maintained as the One beyondBeing. What came to be known as the 'divine names' tradition was situated atthe nexus of these two requirements. The problem was: How can the tra-ditional divine attributes - such as goodness, love, wisdom, power and so on -which are finite and immanent, be predicated of God, who is infinite andtranscendent? It was Thomas Aquinas who, following Aristotle, developed theChristian interpretation of analogy. Positive qualities can indeed belong toGod substantially, but only insofar as they are treated 'analogically': either interms of an ordered relationship between two proportions (for example, thedivine goodness is to God as human goodness is to man - the 'analogy ofproportionality'); or by reference to a focal meaning or 'prime analogate' (forexample, 'Goodness', which God is said to possess eminently and creatures

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only derivatively - the 'analogy of proportion').14 In France, Neo-Thomistssuch as Etienne Gilson were the great defenders of analogy, which attemptedto straddle the immanence/transcendence tension in theology.

It is not difficult to ascertain how Derrida and Deleuze position themselvesrather definitively on either side of this orthodox divide. Derrida was early onseen to have a kind of 'elective affinity' with what was known as 'negativetheology', which insisted that God in his absolute substance or essence can onlybe defined negatively, according to strict rules of transcendence. MeisterEckhart, for instance, preferred to say 'God is not' rather than 'God is', because'x is' is a statement that is said of beings like you and me, whereas God iseminently superior to Being, beyond Being.15 This allows God to appear in his'supra-substantial' or 'hyper-essential' eminence, as far from all negation as heis from any affirmation. In negative theology, one goes beyond affirmations(God is good) via negations (God is not good in the human sense of the term),and beyond both affirmations and negations to attain God's eminence (God isgood with an 'incomparable' or 'ineffable' Goodness, a goodness that transcendsall goodness, that is beyond goodness). Or, as Derrida says, what is 'proper' toGod is to have no properties as such, or to 'be' 'nothing'. The logical formula oftranscendence is to say that something 'is' neither x nor not-x, because it isbeyond them both.16 Derrida, by his own admission, adopts this formula oftranscendence in his analyses of differance. Differance, he says,

'is' neither this nor that, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positivenor negative, neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive, neitherpresent nor absent, not even neutral, not even subject to a dialectic with athird moment, without any possible sublation (Aufhebung). Despite appear-ances, then, it [differance] is neither a concept nor even a name; it does lenditself to a series of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even theorder and the structure of predicative discourse. It 'is' not and does not saywhat 'is'. It is written completely otherwise. (Derrida 1992e, 74)

It is true that Derrida is not 'doing' a negative theology, in so far as the latterseems to reserve, 'beyond all positive predication, beyond all negation, evenbeyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being' which wouldperhaps be given in some sort of 'intuition or vision' (Derrida 1992e, 77, 79).But although Derrida refuses to assign any content to this transcendence, whathe retains from the tradition is its formal structure: differance is that which isnever present as such, is absolutely other, discernible only through its trace,whose movement is infinitely deferred, infinitely differing from itself, definable,at best, in terms of what it is not. This is why Derrida can write: 'I trust notext that is not in some way contaminated with negative theology, and even


among those texts that apparently do not have, want, or believe they have anyrelation with theology in general' (Derrida 1995c, 69). There is no text of themetaphysical tradition that is not 'contaminated' with this formal structure oftranscendence, or this movement of differance.

When Deleuze, for his part, injects himself into the divine-names tradition,he is equally critical of both analogy and negative theology, and explicitly alignshimself with the tradition of univocity (first formulated by Duns Scotus, andwhich Deleuze sees extended in Spinoza and Nietzsche). The reason is clear:the sole raison d'etre of negative theology is to preserve transcendence (we haveto negate all predicates or properties of God, because God transcends themall), whereas univocity is the position of immanence pushed to its most extremepoint. As formulated by Duns Scotus, it says that the term 'Being' is alwaysused univocally, in other words, when I say that 'God is' or 'Man is' or 'a catis' or 'a flea is', the word 'is' is being used in one and the same sense in all thesesentences. In other words, God does not have a different mode of being fromother creatures - that is, a transcendent mode of being that could be accessed(or not) only through negation or analogy. The univocity of Being entails theradical denial of any ontological transcendence, and for this reason was ahighly heterodox - and often heretical - position because it hinted at pantheismor even atheism. (The English word 'dunce' is derived from the term ofdisapprobation used to describe the followers of Duns Scotus.) Deleuzesuggests that the tradition of univocity was continued in Spinoza, for whomGod and Nature are one and the same thing, and then in Nietzsche. In thissense, univocity can be read as the medieval ontological version of the 'deathof God'. Difference and Repetition is, among other things, an attempt to followthrough on the ontological - and not merely theological - implications ofunivocity. Tellingly, to my knowledge, Derrida never mentions the tradition ofunivocity in his writings. This example from the history of philosophy exempli-fies the broad differences between the ontologies of Deleuze and Derrida: inDeleuze one finds an ontology that seeks to expunge from Being all remnantsof transcendence, whereas in Derrida one finds an ontology that seeks to tracethe eruptions and movements of transcendence within Being.

We turn now to the third context in which the immanence-transcendencedistinction has played a historically important role, which is found in Kant andis oriented primarily towards epistemology. At one point, Kant describes theentire project of the first critique in terms of the immanence/transcendencedistinction: 'We shall entitle the principles whose application is confinedentirely within the limits of possible experience, immanent, and those, on theother hand, which profess to pass beyond these limits, transcendent1 (Kant1929, A295-6/B352). In a famous image, Kant portrays the domain of theunderstanding as a demarcated 'territory' or island (immanence) surrounded

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by a vast ocean of metaphysical illusion (transcendence).17 When I use aconcept such as 'table' or 'chair' to synthesise my intuition or perceptions, Iam operating immanently within the bounds of possible experience. But whenI use a concept like the 'soul' or the 'world' or 'God', I am going beyond thebounds of possible experience, transcending them. Following Plato, Kant willcall these concepts that transcend experience 'Ideas'. The Idea of the world,for example, as the totality of what is, has no intuition or perception that couldever correspond to it. To use the famous Kantian distinction, we can think theWorld, but we can never know it; strictly speaking, it is not an object of ourexperience. Hence, we are led into inevitable illusions when we ask questionsabout the World as if it were an object of experience. For instance: Did it havea beginning in time, or is it eternal? Does it have boundaries in space, or doesit go on forever? The same holds for our Ideas of the Soul and God: Soul,World and God are all transcendent Ideas, and in the 'TranscendentalDialectic', the longest section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant analyses thenature of the paradoxes or aporias reason is led into because of these illusions:the paralogisms of the Soul, the antinomies of the World, the ideal of God.Kant called his project a transcendental philosophy because it sought immanentcriteria that would allow us to distinguish between these legitimate andillegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In this sense, the 'transcen-dental' is opposed to the 'transcendent': the aim of Kant's transcendentalphilosophy is the critique of transcendence, and hence the search for immanentcriteria of critique - that is, immanent to reason itself. A transcendentalcritique is a purely immanent critique.

The Kantian formulation of the distinction between immanence and tran-scendence is useful to our purposes for two reasons. On the one hand, Kantdefines his project in immanent terms as a critique of transcendence, and thusfunctions as a precursor to Deleuze. On the other hand, Kant nonethelessresurrects the transcendent Ideas, in the second critique, as the necessarypostulates of practical reason, thereby assigning to Ideas an important regulativerole, and in this respect functioning as a precursor to Derrida. Indeed, thenotion of an 'Idea' is an explicit touchstone for both Deleuze and Derrida.Deleuze devotes an entire chapter of his magnum opus Difference and Repetition,as one might expect, to developing a purely immanent theory of Idea (as amultiplicity). Derrida, for his part, repeatedly flags the fact that many of hisnotions - such as the gift, opening, democracy, etc. - have a status that is'analogous' to transcendent Ideas 'in the Kantian sense'.18 For instance, in hisanalyses of the gift, Derrida says that a pure gift, a pure giving, is animpossibility, because when I say 'Thank you', or even accept the gift, I startcancelling the gift, since, in a movement of reappropriation, I am proposing akind of equivalence between the giving and my gratitude. The transcendent


logic of the pure gift is thereby incorporated into an immanent economy ofexchange and debt. But this, says Kant, is the very nature of transcendentIdeas. Whenever we speak of something 'pure' or 'absolute' or 'infinite', asDerrida often does (the 'pure gift', 'absolute responsibility', the 'infiniteother'), we are in the realm of transcendence, since we never encounter thepure or the absolute in our experience, it is never something that can bepresent to our experience. The Idea of a pure mother, for instance, would bethe idea of a mother who would not be something other than a mother - not adaughter, not a lover, not a wife. We can think this Idea, but we don'tencounter it in experience. (The Christian Idea of the 'Virgin Mary', as themother of God, might be said to approximate this Idea of a pure mother.) Thesame holds for the logic of the pure gift, of justice, of democracy and so on.Indeed, in Aporias, Derrida explains that, when he was shopping around for aterm to describe the formal status of his concepts - or rather his 'quasi-concepts' - he initially thought of adopting the Kantian term 'antinomy', butfinally decided to use the Greek term 'aporia' instead (Derrida 1993a, 16).19

The reason is that he wanted to distance himself from Kant, since theirrespective problems, as he explains, are analogous but not identical (thedifference, in part, lies in their temporal structure). The fundamental aporia orantinomy, for Derrida, is that the 'condition of possibility' for, say, a 'gift' or a'decision', is its very impossibility, which is why he describes his list of quasi-concepts as 'so many aporetic places or dislocations' (Derrida 1993a, 15).

But if the notion of the 'pure gift' is by definition a transcendent Idea, theimmanent concept that corresponds to it is, precisely, debt (since any gift thatis given is immediately incorporated into the cycle of exchange and indebted-ness). This is in fact what one encounters in Deleuze's work: an immanentanalysis of debt, and not a transcendent analysis of the pure gift. In this,Deleuze follows Nietzsche, whose own immanent critique of morality - theGenealogy of Morals - was grounded in an analysis of debt. It was in the debtor-creditor relation, Nietzsche writes, 'that one person first encountered anotherperson, that one person first measured himself against another'.20 In this regard,a certain compatibility exists between Derrida and Deleuze. Deleuze would nodoubt agree that the condition of possibility for the 'pure gift' is its impossibil-ity, and that the gift itself has an 'aporetic' status. But this simply points to thetranscendence of the concept, and the need for an immanent analysis of giftgiving insofar as it is always enmeshed in the immanent relations of exchangeand debt. Derrida and Deleuze each modify Kant's notion of 'conditions ofpossibility' in formulas that sum up their philosophical projects. Derridadefines deconstruction as the experience of the possibility of the impossible -that is, the (impossible) possibility of the impossible 'marks an absoluteinterruption in the regime of the possible' (Coward and Foshay 1992, 290).

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Such is the formula of transcendence. Deleuze, for his part, defines hisphilosophy, not as a search for the conditions of possible experience, but ratherthe conditions of real experience. Such is the formula of immanence.

This distinction between the two different theories of Ideas one finds inDeleuze and Derrida is necessarily carried over into two different theories ofdesire. Plato had already linked Ideas to the theory of desire (Eros). In Kant,the Critique of Practical Reason is presented as an analysis of a 'higher' facultyof desire that is determined by the representation of a pure form (an Idea) -namely, the pure form of a universal legislation, or the moral law. This samelinkage is carried over in Deleuze and Derrida. For a certain period of time,Deleuze was characterised (at least in France) as a 'philosopher of desire', inpart because one of the aims of Anti-Oedipus (1972) had been to develop apurely immanent conception of desire. For our purposes, however, it is perhapsmore useful to examine Deleuze's analysis of the contrasting transcendentconception of desire, since it anticipates, mutatis mutandis, the theory of desireone finds in Derrida. The transcendent theory of desire can be summarised inthree distinct moments. First, if I desire something, it is because I lack thatsomething. But whereas need is a relative lack that is satisfied as soon its objectis attained, desire has traditionally been defined as an irremediable ontologicallack which, by its very nature, is unrealisable - precisely because its object istranscendent, or absolutely other (Good, One, God, Moral Law). From Platoand Augustine to Hegel and Freud, desire has been defined, ontologically, asa function of a field of transcendence, in relation to transcendence (asexpressed in an Idea). Desire thus presents us with a 'tragic' vision ofhumanity: as humans, we are incomplete and riddled with deficiencies, andontological desire is the sign of our incompleteness, of our 'lack of being'. The'moral' of this vision, in turn, is that we need to acquire our being: in Plato, forinstance, we need to make our desire coincide with the order of the Good, anorder which desire itself furthers (Symposium); in St Augustine, desire aims atGod, an impossible desire (in this life) which accounts for the perpetual'restlessness' of the soul (caritas versus cupiditas). Hence, finally, the 'dramatic'dimension of desire as expressed in the theme of the quest, the incessantsearch: the initial postulate of our lack of Being is pregnant with a series ofintermediate postulates that lead to the ultimate postulate of a recoveredBeing.

But there is a second and third moment to this transcendent theory ofdesire. If desire aims at a transcendent object that is by nature unattainable,then what is it that comes to satisfy this desire? The answer: what satisfies thistranscendent desire, and gives it a kind of immanence, is akin to what we calla state of pleasure. But this pleasure is, alas, a false immanence, a pseudo-immanence, a kind of delusion or illusion. Desire is calmed for a moment -


but then begins again. In Freud, for instance, desire is experienced, energeti-cally, as a disagreeable tension, a kind of 'charge'. To get out of thisdisagreeable state, a discharge is necessary, and this discharge is experienced asa pleasure. Humans will then have peace, their desire will be calmed - butonly for a moment, for desire is reborn, and a new discharge becomesnecessary. Pleasure, at this level, becomes the only immanent unit capable ofmeasuring desire. The final moment: if desire is an 'intentionality' that aims atwhat it lacks, and is measured in terms of a unit (pleasure as discharge) that isnot its own, then we must say that these states of pleasure - such as orgasm orecstasy, whether mystical or otherwise - only provide illusory or apparentsatisfactions to desire; its 'true' satisfaction is never present, but is infinitelydelayed, infinitely deferred. The irreducibility of desire to states of pleasuremust be reaffirmed under another mode: it is the relation (as Lacan puts it)between an 'impossible jouissance' and death. In other words, as long as desireis defined as a function of transcendence, as a desire for the other, then thecondition of possibility for desire is its very impossibility. In Deleuze's analysis,then, the transcendent theory of desire comprises three moments: (1) desire isthe mark of our 'lack' of being, since the object of desire is transcendent; but(2) one can only hope for illusory discharges of desire in acts of pleasure; andthus (3) desire is pursuing a jouissance that is ultimately impossible.21 In thismanner, says Deleuze, the theory of desire is completely ensnared in a field oftranscendence.

This is a quick summary of the analysis of desire presented in Anti-Oedipus,but it is not difficult to ascertain the degree to which Derrida participates inthis tradition, and indeed pushes it to its limit. Not only does Derridaconceptualise a purely formal structure of transcendence under the guise ofthe 'absolute other' or the tout autre (moreover, if the absolute other isirreducible to a concept, or a word, for example, it is because it transcends theorders of conceptualisation, or language); he also undertakes a persistentexploration of the experience of this transcendence, which he often expresses,in terms almost identical to Deleuze's analysis of desire, as an 'interminableexperience', 'the experience of the impossible', a 'double bind'. What does itmean to 'live' the aporias of the gift or justice? Can one 'experience' theimpossible? Derrida replies: yes. 'If the gift is another name for the impossible,we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it. And this even if orbecause or to the extent that we never encounter it, we never know it, we neververify it, we never experience it in its present existence or its phenomenon'(Derrida 1992c, 29).

What then is the nature of this 'experience of the impossible'? Derridareplies: a double bind. The Idea of justice is not deconstructable, for Derrida,because it is an infinitely transcendent Idea that is unknowable: it provides no

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knowledge, and is independent of any determinable context.22 This means, onthe one hand, that we can only experience the Idea of justice practically as acall, as a call to justice, as an absolute demand for justice; but it also means,on the other hand, that the Idea of justice provides us no rule for determiningwhen a decision is just or unjust. Hence the double bind of the aporeticexperience: the condition of possibility for acting justly is grounded in theimpossibility of ever knowing when or if an act is just. And as Derridacomments, 'a double bind cannot be assumed; one can only endure it in apassion1 (Derrida 1998, 36).23 What then is the 'passion' or 'desire' specific tothe experience of the impossible? It is a desire for the absolute other, andhence a desire that is infinitely suspended, whose fulfilment is infinitely deferred:

Isn't it proper to desire to carry with it its own proper suspension, the deathor the phantom of desire? To go toward the absolute other, isn't that theextreme tension of a desire that tries thereby to renounce its own propermomentum, its own movement of appropriation? . . . And since we do notdetermine ourselves before this desire, since no relation to self can be sure ofpreceding it, to wit, of preceding a relation to the other, . . . a// reflection iscaught in the genealogy of this genitive (i.e., 'desire of. . .'). (Derrida1995c, 37)

Thus, for Derrida, the possibility of openness or invention (e.g., the possibilityof'an other justice', 'an other polities', and so on [e.g., Derrida 1997a, 24]) isnecessarily linked to the transcendent Idea of the absolutely other. The 'disrup-tions' Derrida introduces into thought are the movements of this formalstructure of transcendence. One can see clearly how Derrida's notion of desire,in relation to, for example, the 'infinite Idea of justice', recapitulates the threemoments of the transcendent theory of desire outlined by Deleuze: (1) the'call' to justice has as its object an 'infinite' Idea that is unrealisable, and thattranscends any determinable context; (2) what comes to fulfil the call to justiceare 'decisions' (e.g., by judges in a court of law), but these 'decisions' as suchcannot be determined to be just, so the call to justice is continually reborn;hence (3) the call to justice can never be fulfilled or satisfied, it is theexperience of something that is fundamentally impossible. Derrida not onlyseeks to disengage a formal structure of transcendence (differance), but todescribe the desire or passion of that transcendence (defined as a double bindor experience of the impossible). For his part, Deleuze agrees with Derrida'sanalyses, and provides variations of his own, but they are always a prelude toeliminating transcendence and providing an immanent account of the samephenomenon: an immanent ontology (univocity), an immanent theory of Ideas


(defined in terms of multiplicities and singularities), and an immanent theoryof desire (defined as the prolongation or synthesis of singularities).

No matter which formulation one considers, then, one finds Derrida andDeleuze following diverging philosophical trajectories, marked by these twovectors of transcendence and immanence. First, in the tradition of subjectivity,transcendence refers to what transcends the self (the other, the world) - ormore profoundly, to the subject itself, as that which transcends the pure 'fluxof consciousness' or 'flow of experience'. One can critique the status of thesubject by appealing to the transcendence of the Other, or by appealing to theconditions of the immanent flux of experience that the subject itself transcends(theory of intensity). Second, with regard to the question of ontology, transcen-dence refers to that which is 'beyond' or 'otherwise than' Being - or, in itsmore contemporary form, to relations to the other that 'interrupt' Being, orerupt or intervene within Being. Whereas Deleuze defines both Being andbeings immanently in terms of a genetic principle of difference, Derrida definesdifferance transcendently as 'originary' difference that is beyond both Being andbeings. Finally, from the viewpoint of a Kantian (or neo-Kantian) epistemol-ogy, transcendence refers to those Ideas of objects that lie outside the imma-nent realm of possible experience. Deleuze attempts to formulate an immanenttheory of Ideas and desire, while Derrida attempts to define a purely formalstructure of transcendence and the passion of the double bind that it entails.In each of these areas, Deleuze's and Derrida's projects move in very differentdirections, despite so many surface similarities and affinities.

But this leads to an obvious final question: How should one assess thisdifference? Can one say that the trajectory of transcendence or of immanenceis 'better' than the other? This is a difficult question, perhaps reducible, in theend, to what one might call philosophical 'taste'. My own view is that the'philosophy of the future' (to use Nietzsche's phrase) needs to move in thedirection of immanence, for at least two reasons. The most obvious reason isthat the validity of a critique of transcendence above all stems from thetheoretical interest to expose its fictional or illusory status - this has been aconstant of philosophy from Hume through Kant to Nietzsche, its 'demystifi-catory' role. But the more important reason has to do with practical philos-ophy, with ethics and politics. Kant, Levinas and Derrida, along with manyothers, while perhaps denying transcendence a constitutive status, are nonethe-less willing to assign it a practical role (regulative, imperative, communicative,and so on). For Deleuze, this is equally illegitimate, but it seems to have beena source of genuine perplexity to Deleuze. There is a curious passage in Whatis Philosophy? where Deleuze and Guattari more or less ask: What is it withimmanence? It should be the natural acquisition and milieu of philosophy, yet

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such is not always the case. Moreover, the arguments brought to bear againstimmanence are almost always moral arguments. Without transcendence, weare warned, we will fall into a dark of chaos, reduced to a pure 'subjectivism'or 'relativism', living in a world without hope, with no vision of an alternatefuture. Indeed, the two philosophers who pushed followed the trajectory ofimmanence the furthest - Spinoza and Nietzsche - were condemned by boththeir contemporaries and successors, not only for being atheists, but, evenworse, for being 'immoralists'. The potent danger that was sensed to be lurkingin the Ethics and the Genealogy of Morals was precisely the danger of imma-nence. 'Immanence', Deleuze writes, 'can be said to be the burning touchstoneof all philosophy . . . because it takes upon itself all the dangers that philosophymust confront, all the condemnations, persecutions and repudiations that itundergoes. This at least persuades us that the problem of immanence is notabstract or merely theoretical. At first sight, it is not easy to see why imma-nence is so dangerous, but it is. It swallows up sages and gods' (DG 1994b,45; trans, modified).

From this practical point of view, Spinoza poses the most interesting testcase of the position of immanence. Heidegger himself wrote notoriously littleon Spinoza, which is a surprising omission, since Spinoza's Ethics is a work ofpure ontology that explicitly poses the problem of the ontological difference interms of the difference between the infinite substance (Being) and its finitemodes (beings). Derrida too has written little on Spinoza. By contrast,Deleuze's reformulation of ontology in Spinozistic terms not only allows himto push the Heideggerian heritage in an immanent direction (rather thanDerrida's transcendent direction), but also to understand that ontology inexplicitly ethical terms. Like Spinoza, Deleuze defines beings immanently interms of their intensity or 'degree of power', a degree which is actualised atevery moment in terms of the whole of one's 'affections' (which are nonethelessin constant variation). The fundamental question of ethics is not 'What must Ido?' (the question of morality) but rather 'What can I do?' Given my degree ofpower, what are my capabilities and capacities? How can I come into activepossession of my power? How can I go to the limit of what I 'can do'? Thepolitical question follows from this, since those in power have an obviousinterest in separating us from our capacity to act. But this is what makestranscendence an eminently pragmatic and ethical issue. The ethical themesone finds in transcendent philosophies such as those of Levinas and Derrida -an absolute responsibility for the other that I can never assume, or an infinitecall to justice that I can never satisfy - are, from the point of view ofimmanence, imperatives whose effect is to separate me from my capacity toact. From the viewpoint of immanence, in other words, transcendence representsmy slavery and impotence reduced to its lowest point: the absolute demand to do


the absolutely impossible is nothing other than the concept of impotence raisedto infinity. This is why transcendence itself poses precise and difficult ethicalproblems for a philosophy of immanence: If transcendence represents myimpotence (power = 0), then under what conditions can I have actually beenled to desire transcendence? What are the conditions that could have led, inNietzsche's words, to 'the inversion of the value-positing eye'? How could Iactually reach the point where I desire my slavery and subjection as if it weremy salvation? (In a similar way, immanence poses a precise and difficultproblem for a philosophy of transcendence: How can one bridge the intervalthat separates the transcendent from the immanent - for instance, the intervalbetween the undeconstructability of justice from the deconstructability of thelaw?)

In short, the difference between the two philosophical trajectories of imma-nence and transcendence must be assessed and evaluated, not simply in thetheoretical domain, but in the ethico-political domain. In part, this is becausethe speculative elimination of transcendence does not necessarily lead to itspractical elimination, as one can see already in Kant. But more importantly, itis because it is at the ethical level that the difference between transcendenceand immanence appears in its most acute and consequential form. On thisscore, it is perhaps the difference between Deleuze and Levinas that presentsthis contrast most starkly. For Levinas, ethics precedes ontology because it isderived from an element of transcendence (the Other) that is necessarily'otherwise' than Being (and hence privileges concepts like absolute responsi-bility and duty). For Deleuze, ethics is ontology because it is derived from theimmanent relation of beings to Being at the level of their existence (and henceprivileges concepts such as puissance (power or capacity) and affectivity). Thisis why Spinoza entitled his pure ontology an Ethics rather than an Ontology: hisspeculative propositions concerning the univocity of Being can only be judgedpractically at the level of the ethics they envelop or imply. Put summarily, forLevinas, ethics is derived from transcendence, while for Deleuze, transcen-dence is what prevents ethics. It seems to me that it is at this level - at thepractical and not merely speculative level - that the relative merits of philoso-phies of immanence and transcendence need to be assessed and decided.24

Notes

1. See Agamben 1999, 239. Edith Wyschogrod (1990, 191, 223, 229) distin-guishes between philosophers of difference (Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot) andphilosophers of the plenum (Deleuze and Guattari, Genet), but this distinctionseems far less germane than Agamben's.

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2. See Sartre 1972 as well as Deleuze 1990, 98-9; 343-4. Deleuze will retain thenotion of an impersonal transcendental field, but strips it of any determinationas a constituting consciousness.

3. See DG 1994b, 46: 'Kant discovered the modern way of saving transcendence:this is no longer the transcendence of Something, or of a One higher thaneverything (contemplation), but that of a Subject to which the field of imma-nence is only attributed by belonging to a self that necessarily represents sucha subject to itself (reflection).'

4. See Deleuze 1997, 137: 'The poisoned gift of Platonism was to have reintro-duced transcendence into philosophy, to have given transcendence a plausiblephilosophical meaning.' Deleuze is here referring primarily to ontologicaltranscendence.

5. See also Heidegger 1982, 4: '"Christian God" also stands for the "transcend-ent" in general in its various meanings - for "ideals" and "norms", "principles"and "rules", "ends" and "values", which are set "above" Being, in order to giveBeing as a whole a purpose, an order, and - as it is succinctly expressed -"meaning".'

6. In this, Derrida is certainly more faithful to Heidegger, and is attempting, inan explicit manner, to carry forward a trajectory already present in Heidegger'swork: the immanent question of being and its transcendental horizon (time),which is posed in Being and Time, comes to be progressively displaced by thetranscendent themes of Ereignis (the 'event') and the es gibt (the 'gift' [Gabe] oftime and being). The trajectory is continued in the Derridean themes ofrevelation and promise. See Derrida 1992e, 122-4.

7. See Derrida 1978, 117, where history is characterised as 'the very movementof transcendence, of the excess over the totality, without which no totalitywould appear'.

8. See also Derrida 1981b, 10: one must 'borrow the syntaxic and lexicalresources of the language of metaphysics . . . at the very moment one decon-structs this language'.

9. Derrida 198la, 168: 'Differance, the disappearance of any originary presence,is at once the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility oftruth.'

10. Significantly, Derrida says the first question he would have asked Deleuzewould have concerned the term immanence - a term 'on which he alwaysinsisted' (Derrida 200la, 195).

11. For Deleuze's interpretation of Platonism, see in particular 'Plato and theSimulacrum' in Deleuze 1990, 253-66 (though the concept of the simulacrumdeveloped there assumes less and less importance in Deleuze's work).

12. Levinas 1969. Deleuze never discusses Levinas' work directly, except as aninstance of Jewish philosophy (DG 1994b, 233n5). See, however, Badiou2001.

13. For their respective discussion of the divine names traditon, see Deleuze 1992;Derrida, 1995c.

14. For Thomas Aquinas' formulations of analogy, see Summa Theologiae 1.13.5.The great modern proponent of the way of affirmation is Charles Williams(1994).

15. See Schurmann 1978, especially 72-192. While recognizing Eckhart's affinities


with immanence (see 176; 252n56) and with an immanent causality (177),Schurmann attempts to provide a qualified analogical interpretation of histeachings (179).

16. Derrida characterises the nature of deconstruction itself in terms derived fromthe tradition of negative theology. See Derrida 1988a, 5: 'What deconstructionis not? everything of course! What is deconstruction? nothing of course!'

17. See Kant 1929, A236-7/B294-5: 'We have now not merely explored theterritory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but havealso measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. Thisdomain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is theland of truth - enchanting name! - surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean,the native home of illusion.'

18. Derrida himself draws the analogy between Kantian Ideas and his ownconcepts at numerous points throughout his work. For instance, the structureor logic of the gift, Derrida tells us, has 'a form analogous to Kant's transcen-dental dialectic, as relation between thinking and knowing. We are going togive ourselves over to engage in the effort of thinking or rethinking a sort oftranscendental illusion of the gift' (Derrida 1992c, 29-30; emphasis added).Similarly, Derrida notes that 'I have on several occasions spoken of "uncondi-tional" affirmation or of "unconditional" "appeal". . . . Now, the very leastthat can be said of "unconditionality" (a word that I use not by accident torecall the character of the categorical imperative in its Kantian form) is that itis independent of every determinate context, even of the determination of acontext in general. It announces itself as such only in the opening of context'(Derrida 1988b, 152-3). To be sure, Derrida refuses to accommodate his ownthought to Kantian formulations: 'Why have I always hesitated to characterizeit [deconstruction] in Kantian terms, for example, or more generally in ethicalor political terms, when that would have been so easy and would have enabledme to avoid so many critiques, themselves all too facile? Because suchcharacterizations seem to me essentially associated with philosophemes thatthemselves call for deconstructive questions' (Derrida 1988b, 153).

19. See also Derrida 1993e, 84, where he is still hesitating between the two terms:'The concept of responsibility [would be] paralyzed by what can be called anaporia or an antinomy.'

20. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Essay II, §8, as quoted at Deleuze 1983,213-14.

21. For a summary of Deleuze's theory of desire, see his seminar of 26 March1973, available on-line at <http://www.webdeleuze.com/sommaire.html>,English translation at <http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/2may2001/deleuze.pdf>.

22. For the idea that the deconstruction of the law 'operates on the basis of theinfinite "Idea of justice"', see Derrida 1992b, 25. That the Idea of justiceimplies 'non-gathering, dissociation, heterogeneity, non-identity with itself,endless inadequation, infinite transcendence' see Derrida 1997b, 17. On the Ideaof justice being 'independent of all determinable contexts', see Derrida 1997a,215-16.

23. My thanks to Andrew Montin for this reference.24. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the

http://www.webdeleuze.com/sommaire.html

http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/2may2001/deleuze.pdf

http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/2may2001/deleuze.pdf

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International Association of Philosophy and Literature at Erasmus University,Rotterdam, in June 2002. The ideas in this paper originated in discussionswith Andrew Haas and Andrew Montin at the University of New South Walesand benefited greatly from suggestions from the editors of this volume.

deleuze and derrida, immanence and transcendence: two ...in a recent essay, giorgio agamben has...

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